Fire Season

“Verbal artistry is in plentiful supply in this spirited collection of 39 essays in which critic Indiana (Horse Crazy) trains his eye on major court cases, politics, and pop culture. “Northern Exposure” is a look at the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primaries in which Indiana eviscerates the personae and platforms of Bill Clinton and Pat Buchanan (the latter summed up as a “belligerent turd at the podium with his socks falling down”) and notes Sen. Tom Harkin’s silent nonresponse to an anti-Semitic comment: “I cannot imagine Mario Cuomo or Jay Rockefeller letting such remarks just sit there in the room, just to grub a couple of votes.” “Murdering the Dead” takes down Steven Hodel’s argument in his bestselling Black Dahlia Avenger that his father killed Elizabeth Short: “It isn’t nice to drag a lot of famous dead people into your family muck.” Each entry is marked by vivid imagery and the author’s scathing, eloquent wit: “There is acid in everything Indiana writes, but it is of the sort that acts as a purifying agent,” Christian Lorentzen writes in the introduction, adding, “His essays are humane to the core.” Trenchant and thought-provoking, this is a great look at a gifted writer’s mind. (Apr.)“—Publishers Weekly“Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as sharp a pen as Gary Indiana, whose new essay collection, Fire Season (Seven Stories Press, $23.95), spans almost forty years of stellar criticism.“—Claire Messud, Harper’s“Indiana’s hungry readers will devour these essays and lick their chops, feeling satisfied as they wait for more from him.”—Jennifer Krasinsky, 4Columns“Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories — all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text…” —Los Angeles Times“Indiana is viperous: he can strike fast, with a deadly venom apparent only once the laughter has subsided, or opt for slow constriction. “—Michael La Pointe, Times Literary Supplement“Indiana’s reputation as mean is such an odd categorization for someone who is so capable of feeling the struggles of his subjects, to see their risk as his own.“—Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum“Throughout Fire Season, Indiana shows himself to be landscapist worthy of Bosch and a portraitist worthy of Francis Bacon: he paints with a rich palette of displeasures whose pigments range from the scatological to the refined. “—Ryan Ruby, New Left Review

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), “a desolate frieze of New York’s aging bohemians,” Indiana’s novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, following it up in 2018 with Vile Days, a collection of his art criticism for the Village Voice. Called one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today,” “the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society,” and “one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche,” Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

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